Bryan Starbuck

The Best Mashup: Tafiti

Newly launched Tafiit may be one of the best mashups out there.  People often talk about mashups but I haven't been impressed with many that I have seen so far.

Estately.com is the only one that has impressed me.  After looking at a house, you can see photos and interesting places nearby, which comes from 43places.

Tafiti.com was just launched.  Tafiti is a search engine on top of Windows Live Search.  They greatly improve the user interface by using Silverlight.

Do a simple search for your name or something else specific.  You can then easily view everything on the internet related to that issue.

Kaneva = SecondLife + MySpace

Kaneva is one of the most amazing companies I've seen recently.  Kaneva is like SecondLife combined with MySpace.

It creates a social network like MySpace.  It lets users go into a SecondLife like environment when they want to get more involved.  It then allows the user's photo and video content inside of that 3-D environment.

In hindsight it is an obvious idea.  Congratulations to the Kaneva guys.

This is a great video that explains Kaneva:  http://www.kaneva.com/channel/crad30.people

It will be very difficult for them to be as good as MySpace + Flickr + YouTube + SecondLife.  However allowing users to bridge between each is a powerful advantage.  I think long-term, each of the individual services will either need to compete, integrate, or loose to a service like Kaneva.

It is currently invite only to use Kaneva.  You can email me or post your email address in the comments if you want to receive an invite.

-Bryan

PR for Internet Startups

PR is very important for the launch plan for internet startups.  Every month, a group of founders of internet startups get together here in Seattle to discuss issues we all face at Seattle Tech Startups. 

I'm bringing together a speaker and a panel of PR experts that specialize in working with internet startups during their launch.  The meeting will be on February 22nd.

I will facilitate the panel discussion. 

Speakers:

Paul Forecki

Paul Forecki is founder and president of VOXUS PR, a fast growing boutique
agency targeting emerging high tech companies.  Paul has over 15 years of
experience in launching and building campaigns for 120+ companies, from
boot-strap startups to high-growth venture-fueled rockets to global,
publicly traded market leaders.  More information is available at
www.voxuspr.com.

Panelists:

Panelists include Paul Forecki and Deanna Leung.

Deanna Leung:

Deanna Leung has over 15 years of corporate marketing experience and is a
partner at Buzz Builders, a boutique PR firm that specializes in early stage
companies. Prior to Buzz Builders, Deanna was the marketing director at
Aventail, where she defined a new product category and positioned the
company as an industry leader with positive analyst recommendations,
extensive press coverage, and more than 22 major industry awards. In the
early-90’s, she drove the PR initiatives at SPRY with the successful
introduction of Internet In A Box and later at CompuServe launching their
Internet service business, SPRYNET.

I may have more people on the panel discussion.

NimbleBee in the Seattle PI

John Cook wrote about NimbleBee today.

For anyone who doesn't know about John Cook's Venture Blog, it is the closest we have to a Settle version of TechCrunch.  John reviews many startups in Seattle.  His blog is also a great place to find out about events going on in Seattle.

NimbleBee is our code name until we launch with our branded site.  You can sign-up if you want to be notified when we launch.

-Bryan

First Time CEO important steps

I gave a talk yesterday at the Seattle Tech Startups meeting.  The talk includes the steps I believe are important for first time CEOs of internet companies.  The meeting is mainly ex-Microsoft ex-Amazon developers who are founders of internet companies here in Seattle.

Several people asked me to post my slide deck so here it is.

Most of the content was verbal.  I put some of the verbal content in the notes at the bottom of each slide.

-Bryan

Tags: Seattle Tech Startups, Keiretsu, Keiretsu Forum, Seattle Keiretsu Forum, Alliance of Angels, AoA, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati, Funding, startups, internet startups.

Seattle Tech Startups Meeting

This coming Tuesday (12/5/2006) is the Seattle Tech Startups meeting (link here).  This is a meeting for founders and other people interested in internet start-ups.

Most of the people who come are ex-Amazon, ex-Microsoft, ex-RealNetworks developers.  The talks include everything from funding to technical issues with growing your internet start-up.

In this Tuesday's meeting, I'll give a talk on growing a company from the founding stage through launch and post-launch.

Where: Seattle Public Library, Capitol Hill branch, upstairs meeting room.
When: 6pm - 7:45pm

Last month Dennis Lee (VP of Technical Operations at MarchEx) gave a talk on the operations side of running a company.

Gaurav Oberoi from BillMonk.com started the Seattle Tech Startups meetings.  Another good blog for the Seattle Startup environment are Bill Monk's blog and Andy Sack's blog A Sack of Seattle.

Another up coming event is Seattle Ignite.

-Bryan

Tags: [Seattle Tech Startups, MarchEx, Seattle Public Library, Capital Hill, Internet Startups, Seattle Startups, Startups]